26 Exchanges: 'My brain is starting to smoke'

Part six of Tom Lynham's attempts to find the meaning in a poem by the Colombian writer Rubén Darío Flórez Arcila.

I am standing outside Clapham Common tube on a blissfully balmy Sunday afternoon. I’ve come to interview a young couple and this cherished London village is awash with them. This is green & pleasant land compared to Hackney’s mean streets. Fruitful too. Buggies engineered to Formula One specifications cradle babies like branded racing drivers. Everyone is lapping up the syrupy spring sunshine. 

Daniel and Laura approach and radiate a chilled out charisma. We like the look of each other and settle into a neighbourhood bar. Daniel is from Southern Portugal. I arrived with a van full of musical instruments in 2004. I could not speak the language and it was very difficult to survive. I worked in a supermarket but wanted to study here. After going to university I started meeting other musicians and got involved with musical projects. Then I met Laura and other Colombians through the Colombiage connection. Laura is from Bogotá Colombia. I was studying industrial design in Colombia but always loved the arts and was dancing there for 6 years. London is such a cosmopolitan city that has everything. I did a course in mixing business with art and began working towards the Colombiage festival. They ran workshops on Latin American dancing and Colombian music workshops for children. Daniel is just back from a tour of Frankfurt, Berlin, Koln and Vienna with his main band - Peyote for President. 

We order drinks and I hand them individual copies of Rubén’s poem. This block of time when people read has become a strange limbo for me. I want to be with them but not inhibit them; witness but not influence; enthuse but not smother; push but not rush. They read separately but exchange glances. They look as if they were made for each other. Daniel the musician and Laura the dancer; on the threshold of their careers. 

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Márquez introduces a colourful character called Pietro. He is a flamboyant Italian who beguiles the bourgeoisie of Macondo. They have built the bones of their town but now hunger after the finer things of life. Pietro is a sugary dandy and a maestro of etiquette. His head covered with patent leather curls aroused in women an irrepressible need to sigh. Milking his Italian charisma he educates the adolescent girls of the Buendía residence in the gentle arts of song and dance. Pietro arrives preceded by a cool breath of lavender and always bringing remarkable toys that fill the house – mechanical ballerinas, music boxes, acrobatic monkeys, trotting horses, clowns who play tambourines... But the most impressive of these wonders is a pianola. The family are amazed by the invisible virtuoso performer, who never puts a note wrong. The music fills the house with love and sensuality. The Italian would arrive at dusk, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and translate Petrarch’s sonnets for Amaranta. They would sit on the porch, suffocated by the oregano and the roses. Pietro romances the extended family of sisters with a schmaltzy charm offensive. It is their first encounter with affairs of the heart, and the sibling rivalry drives a wedge between them. Pietro opens a warehouse in Macondo that becomes a hothouse of fantasy, with reproductions of the bell tower of Florence that told time with a concert of carillons, music boxes from Sorrento, and compacts from China that sang five note melodies. His shop becomes a melodic oasis where citizens could forget the distant nightmare of war. Amaranta falls madly for him, but in Marquez’s century of solitude there are few happy endings. Everyone is ultimately destined to be alone. When Amaranta inexplicably refuses Pietro’s hand in marriage, he pleads and weeps and begs but she doesn’t relent. Broken hearted, he barricades himself in the warehouse and after singing a suicidal serenade in a voice that led one to believe that no other person on earth could feel such love he cuts his wrists.

Laura begins to untangle Rubén’s poem. It’s amazing poetic language, like he’s telling us the state of the world; that if we go on like this we will destroy it. He talks about a blue point in the universe that will disappear. For the indigenous people, coca is a sacred ritual that relieves you of your bad spirit and cleans the soul. We have destroyed the meaning of coca by mixing it with chemicals. When you go up to the sky, you can see behind you the whole world full of everyone with different points of view. I loved it. So what does Daniel makes of it? With Portuguese as his first language, Spanish as his second, and English as his third. Portuguese and Spanish are so similar. But I didn’t get some of the indigenous references. If you miss one or two details you miss the lot. Our languages come from Latin, but in poetry it makes such a difference where you use the word. Laura says she struggles with the Poems on the Underground displayed in tube trains. I just can’t understand ANYTHING! I know what the words mean, but it just reads like nonsense. Daniel tells me they speak Spanish at home, but that words can have very different meanings according to context. I am interested to see how the dynamics of their relationship influence their perception of the poem. Their chemistry kicks in. They inspire and complete each other’s phrasing. They qualify, intensify and magnify. Two people speaking in one voice.

Laura - I love the plane in the sky and I can feel

Daniel - the white clouds…

Laura - I can almost touch them and see the planet earth…

Daniel - full of the crap of humanity…

Laura - addicts, killers, lovers and…

Daniel - when you pesticide something…

Laura - contaminates like you and me with a new sickness…

Daniel - illness - but one that kills a lot of people…

Laura - a new plague without…

Daniel - without sense…

They are enjoying the intellectual entanglement; no longer translating Ruben’s complex poem just for me, but translating for each other with a fearless reciprocity. 

Laura - We have a very good friend, a Colombian writer…

Daniel - Mario Mendoza…

Laura - He can speak only Spanish and he told me that when you write in your own language…

Daniel - you have to master your own language…

Laura - you don’t have any place for other languages.

Daniel laughing and reflecting - They don’t let happen to them what is happening to us. We don’t speak good English, we don’t speak good Portuguese, and we don’t speak good Spanish anymore…

Laura - Yeah we just end up speaking a mixture of everything! 

Big laughter.

Daniel studies the text again and appeals to Laura for help. The poet always goes back to…a description of love and sex - what is that exactly? How is he trying to relate what is going on…? He quotes a couple of lines - de nuevas pestes sin sentido del furor de la guerra de la dulzura de tu amor…

Laura - Yeah he mixes all those bad things with love and sex and relationships.

Daniel floats rhetorical possibilities for Laura to consider. Seems like he is kind of in the middle, and above he’s got the sky…? I don’t know if that’s what he connects with the purity…? And the beauty of love…? And stuff like that…? And then he is somewhere in-between and he can touch the sky and below I’ve got the earth? Laura smiles - Ummm no. Crestfallen - but only for an instant, Daniel explodes with laughter. He wriggles around on his chair and exclaims SEE - THAT’S JUST MY IMAGINATION! 

Laura explores. The poet is in the plane, the planet is down there, he’s talking about wars and illnesses, and killers and drug addicts but he is full of love. The sweet of your love. Complementing all that bad stuff with love.

Daniel interprets Laura’s translation. So - although there is so much crap going round, love will never stop existing?

Laura fine-tunes. The poet is saying there are bad things and love. You’re in the sky; you can see love in a good way but full of wrong things as well. Down there is the earth, I touch the sky. Up there I have the illnesses…the pests…

Daniel - the plagues and the love that comes from down the earth…

Laura - and he makes my heart pump… She looks to Daniel for approval - Yeah?

Daniel scrutinizes Rubén’s text – Latir…is that what dogs do with the full moon? 

This is my chance to get a word in edgeways, so do my best howling wolf impression – HOWWWWOWW... 

Daniel is emphatic. The poet is trying to give you the impression that your heart is screaming…

We are thrilled by the image of a screaming heart. Our hearts howl for love, howl with pain, howl with loneliness, howl with anger. Our heart is like a wild animal living inside us that no logic can ever tame. Our hearts give birth to our life and rubber-stamp our death. 

Laura introduces some powerful new themes. It talks about jealousy and religion as well, believers in any religion... He says the sky comes from a fanatical jealousy, from a cauldron like the witches use. The light of the sky is in there… 

Daniel - there is a burning flame…

Laura - the believers are burning in the cauldron! Some believers are fanatics. They believe in THEIR religion and that’s it.

Daniel - Like supporting a football team? WE ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD AND THAT’S IT!  But how did you get the religion idea?

Laura - He uses los creyentes – the believers. He talks about jealousy. God is in the sky. 

Daniel tries some soul-searching introspection. Is this Divine Love?

Laura is adamant. No no no…

Daniel feigning hapless genuflection throws himself at the mercy of the words - OH GOD FORGIVE ME I DID NOT GET IT! 

We crackle with laughter.

Laura’s on a mission. The believers are burning in this cauldron thingy…when you are a religious person you just grab your god and pray for things to get better. He’s trying to say that it’s pointless. 

Daniel - So religion is one of the things destroying us. If we could stop thinking this way… 

Laura - If you close yourself to one religion - you can’t see that we are one strong force…

Daniel - We all share the blue spot in the sky.

Laura - Yeah, it’s about waking people up. 

Daniel - And how about the coke situation? It’s that awakening?

Laura - The title of the poem is AMAZONAS, EL CIELO Y LA TIERRA which is the Amazon, the sky and the earth. The Amazon is nature, and nature is the planet, and we are just destroying it.

Daniel - The things nature gives you but get labelled as a horrible. Like the drugs... 

Laura - He’s linking one thing to another. He starts talking about the earth, and the nature is inside like penetrating sex. The forest is devouring the people who enter in the darkness. Nature can destroy it through earthquakes, but we are destroying it as well. And then he starts talking about coke. 

Daniel - He’s telling us that we don’t understand the connection we have with everything. As with religion, we separate: This is good. This is bad. You shouldn’t do that. You’re going to pay for this.

Laura - He talks about the indigenous people…

Daniel - they understand all that…

Laura - the solution for these things. Their wisdom…

Daniel - What’s this bit about the coke? La coca empezó con la palabra, era de tierra el sexo? 

Laura - The coke, they use the indigenous language. Coke is a Spanish word - coca. The coke started with the word. 

Daniel - Depending on the way we name things we define them - and we corrupt so many things through naming… 

Laura - Coke works from the earth. Sex…mouth and the saliva… Then he links this with the sky. Links earth with Amazon and then finishes with religion. Amazing! 

Daniel – It’s confusing for me the way he links all the ideas - the coke started with the word. And sex belonged to the earth. The mouth and the saliva. In the saliva was the sky. His eyes widen and he shrieks - MY BRAIN IS STARTING TO SMOKE… The coke was white like the sand in the sea. Land of dreams… 

They read together now in perfect unison. Daniel & Laura - The coke was the sky and the earth every night. 

Daniel sighs with a huge sense of closure. Ahhh…and the change is the digital image; craziness without metaphors for the tribe.

We are exhausted. They have done brilliantly. No preparation. Off the tops of their heads. Dealing with hugely complex issues ambiguously presented. I ask if Ruben’s poem is specifically Colombian as opposed to South American. Laura says - It’s very South American but it’s about all of us. Daniel talks about identity. Colombians have a deeper connection to their nature and tribal roots. Brazil, Peru and Ecuador are physically more similar to their ancestors. Argentina and Chile are more European - even the way they look. But the Amazon is still the green heart of the earth. 

I ask how they translate their creativity into different expressions. Laura - In the way I work with Colombiage we try to show another face of Colombia. Through the power of arts you can translate everything. It’s a way to be inspired and inspire other people. Daniel links it to the planet. Nature will always be more powerful than us. It has the power to adapt. If a catastrophe comes and we all die, nature will go on. My relationship with music is to unlock our emotions. Creativity helps us achieve certain things and understand other things. The effect on people is common to all arts. It’s not so much about being a musician, or a writer, or a dancer, but a species that has to live harmoniously. We are all are connected to this poem - no matter who you are. 

Read part 5 of this exchange.

Comments

[John Simmons]

Tom, what a journey you're on. Loved this.

[Frank]

Hi Tom, thanks for this amazing blog.
I know Ruben, and I am sure that he would love this. Has he seen it? It would be great to chat about it at the exhibition launch.

[mary joyce lising]

Hmmmm, that's another way of looking at it. Great views.

[bathmateus]

I like that posting.

Bathmate